Suck It, Zuckerberg

I just finished The Boy Kings by Katherine Losse, a former insider at Facebook, and it helps confirm a belief that I've had ever since seeing The Social Network: Mark Zuckerberg and his helpers are exactly the sort of people who would start a social-networking site, because they lack the real-life skills to actually make social connections in real life.

Maybe that's a bit harsh, but I think the cold, utilitarian mode of the website doesn't leave much room for human interactions, and for a long time I was cool with that. Because, cavet emptor, I'm exactly the sort of person who would be attracted to a website that keeps people at arm's (or computer screen's) length, even if I see them in real life.

My own Facebook story goes back to 2006, when I was starting back at college and everyone at Clemson was asking me if I was on Facebook. I had a MySpace account because, for the years when I wasn't seemingly moving in any forward motion towards a life of my own, it seemed like I would be left behind in the rush to become something, and I was insecure enough to think that an online profile, however miniscule, was preferable to no online identity at all. You can be anything you want to be online, the internet seems to promise, taking the place of traveling roadside elixir salesmen in talking up the tonic that is online communication. It's just a click away.

So I joined Facebook and haven't looked back...except when I have, and wondered what I became.

Facebook in those days was more user-friendly (sorry, but Timeline is shit. Absolute horrific horseshit, and reading Losse's book confirms for me the belief that Zuckerberg et al. don't give a crap what we as users think about it), and I used it alright. I sent friend requests to people I barely knew from some English class where we might have one social interaction tops, whilst discussing Wuthering Heights. But online, we could become "friends," which meant something (though I don't know if any of us ever knew just what). We could write on each other's walls (my inner comedian could be released full bore on display for the world), send messages if something more private needed to be said, and God help me I poked poor girls to death when that was still a thing (is it? I haven't poked in ages, and don't intend to start back now). But I don't know that it really solved the existential loneliness I felt at both being part of the circle and being apart from it. I didn't live on campus, and I had a job, so my weekends and "free time" were not my own. In those early days, Facebook more often than not made me feel less of a loser because, while I didn't have the time or resources to hang out as much in real life with my friends, I could still stay "connected" to them, revel in the same Beer Pong photos as they did, and it was okay.

Facebook, to be fair, is not evil; no technology is, unless the person using it does so for evil purposes. But it does facilitate something that the internet is infamous for, the sense (however real or imagined) that actions don't have consequences. You can poke someone, the internet says, and they might respond, but it doesn't mean that it has to mean anything (unless you're flirting online, then it's loaded with all sorts of meaning). The internet is meant to be a conduit for communication, but the extent to which we let it replace real-time, face-to-face (as opposed to Facebook-to-Facebook) interaction says a lot about us individually. There have been times when I thought nothing of sending a post to someone that could be misconstrued, or read wrong (I have a sarcastic sense of humor, something which can get lost nuance-wise in the cold, digital display of the spoken word), and there have been times when I thought that Facebook told me more about a person than he or she (usually she, because like every guy I've tried to friend-request girls I liked, and most of the time they accepted, and this led to me imagining all sorts of things that weren't there because it was easier to write on their wall than talk to them in person) said to me. Facebook enables that part of us that's afraid of rejection, that wants to be loved without doing the hard work of connecting for real.

Now, to be fair, I don't intend to delete my Facebook account anytime soon: for one thing, I do have honest-to-God connections with real people that I know in real life but don't get to see anymore, and in that sense social networking really is social. Keeping up with someone's life might still creep me out a little bit (or appeal to the creepy part of me, whatever), but for people who were or are important to me whom I don't get to see for "real," it comes in handy. And while I've never met A.J. Jacobs or Will Leitch or any of the other famous people who accepted me as a "friend," I admire their work and hope that, maybe, in the course of my chosen desire to write for a living (I was interested in sharing myself that way long before social networking came along), I can field friend requests from people who read something I wrote, liked it enough to seek me out, and merely want to show that they like my style (without being prone to breaking into my home at three in the morning because they think we're "soul mates"). The internet still works in making me feel less lonely, less disconnected from the real world (i.e., anything that's not Walhalla). But I'm more careful about it.

I tend to spend less than an hour online every weekday, checking emails in case something important happens (usually not; like you, I get all kinds of spam promising a larger penis. How did they know that I had that problem?). I spend maybe five seconds checking my Facebook if someone posted on my wall or sent me a message, a few minutes more thinking up a witty saying or real-life emotion to do as a status update (as of this writing, and due to a week of listening to Talking Heads, it's a song quote), and maybe gaze longingly at pictures of my niece, who is one of the best things to come into my life in a while (there are a few others, but I won't name them here). I'm good with a few minutes spent there, and yes I'll post this link to my wall, so other people can find it and read it at their discretion. I don't worry so much about "dying unappreciated" as I did when I was younger and more pretentious. But I do still want to see a book with my name in the author's place someday, fiction or non-fiction (or both, as all the anti-Obama books seem to me). So after saying all that about Facebook, I'm gonna post this to it anyway. Humans are contradictory animals, something that I don't think Zuckerberg and the techno-geeks can fathom. You can't solve us with a mathematical formula; we just are. So suck it, Zuckerberg, for creating this addictive and now-essential tool that we all use, even when we hate ourselves for using it.

Jesus Christ: The Greatest Pro of All

I took that title from a line in Walker Percy's Love In the Ruins, which I bought a few weeks back and read over a couple of days this weekend. Hooray for putting things off until you don't!

Anywho, I have TV again...or at least more variety. Allow me to elaborate at length:

At the tail end of the TV season last May, a thunderstorm came along and knocked out a significant chunk of my channels. This was no problem initially because, as I said, the season proper was winding down, and summer reruns and summer "shows that didn't make the schedule during the regular season" were all I really seemed to miss out on. I could still get in a few channels here and there, and I had my reading to keep me occupied. I was good.

Until about last week, when I'd finally had enough. I'd had enough of not getting in channels that I liked just because they were pleasant background noise to my reading or napping (PBS's block of home-improvement shows are far less glittering, but they get the job done). I'd had enough of not getting to watch ESPN for at least a fix of "Sports Center" because it was one of the channels that went in and out. But mostly, I was tired of being stuck with the History Channel as the one that came in the best (of the ones that came in), and because the last time it had anything "historical" on it, Clinton was in the White House.

If you spend enough time watching the History Channel (and God knows I have, perhaps way too much), you begin to think that every workplace has "hijinks" and "kooky characters" who exist solely as a conduit through which the audience can enjoy themselves (though not because they feel better about themselves in comparison, which explains the sadomasochistic appeal of "Toddlers and Tiaras" and the entire block of MTV programming). When you know that "Couting Cars" is the auto expert guy from "Pawn Stars," it's only a matter of time before the go-to gun expert at the shop gets his own show.

God help us all.

Anyway, I'd like to go further, but I only have so long on the computer I'm on, so I gotta wrap it up. No TV: live-able, but barely once the fall season begins. Read more. Avoid TLC. That is all.

Mitt Happens

No, I did not catch the premier of Clint Eastwood's new one-man show, "Angry Old Clint Eastwood Yells at a Chair." I have better things to do with my time, such as reading The Hobbit and wondering why my left earlobe swelled up to the size of a Goodyear tire last week (it's shrinking now, thankfully, and I'll spare you the details because I understand if you're about to eat lunch or something). But I can appreciate why Republicans liked that better than they did their own freakin' candidate.

Watching the GOP try to convince themselves to love Mitt is about as funny as it was on my side, back in '04, when our pretty-boy rich-guy candidate made even wearing a Red Sox cap look awkward and unnatural. John Kerry has a smidgen more charisma than Mitt, however, and it helped that his wife was batshit crazy. Ole Mitt just can't win in the personality sweepstakes.

That being said, the guy could win. White people don't respond well to a black man in the White House (yeah, I said it!), and to be fair, Obama hasn't exactly done what he said he'd do (though the GOP kinda forgets that they're the reason why). I can see Mitt winning in November...and I'm okay with that.

Doom-and-gloom predictions are fine when you're young, or when you're convinced the other guy is Nixonian in his lust for power (Richard Nixon is the most fascinating president to me because he's clearly the most evil. Granted, all the facts about Rutherford B. Hayes aren't in yet, but I doubt anyone past or present will ever top Tricky Dick in the Asshole Presidents Hall of Fame). But I just don't see that this time around. Mitt is like Dubya minus the accent; he's about as comfortable with real, living and breathing people as a serial killer is with a woman who isn't his mother or a prostitute. The dude just doesn't have anything to him that merits being concerned, because his political philosophy is "whatever you say, dear."

Mark Hamill earned my fandom yet again (after all, he did send up himself in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) when he compared Mitt to "the Thing," an alien that can imitate humans without itself being human. I agree with that comparison whole-heartedly, minus the whole "destroying mankind" bit (though I would imagine Mitt would be uncomfortable around Kurt Russell if Kurt's brandishing a Petri dish and a flamethrower).

I can't honestly say that a Romney presidency would be a bad thing, on the whole; as much as I don't want it to come to pass, I wouldn't leave the country if it did. In my lifetime, Dubya is the only president who ever came close to being a dickhead of Nixon's caliber, and he only got that far because, with Dick Cheney next in line (and probably in charge), no one was gonna take a shot at him. It's important to study history because then you realize that we've had some mediocre presidents. Here, I'll name them:

Franklin Pierce
James Buchanan
John Tyler
Rutherford B. Hayes
Martin Van Buren
Calvin Coolidge
Herbert Hoover
William McKinley

So, if Romney gets in, I'm betting he gets on the Mediocre list (Nixon and Harding are on the "criminally bad" list, Reagan makes it as "actor-in-charge bad," and Dubya is in a category all of his own). That's my hope, anyway. With a douche like Paul Ryan in the co-pilot seat, however, it could end up being a lot worse.

If you'll excuse me, tickets for Eastwood's new show are going at a pretty penny. Gotta place my bid now.